JUST TRY IT!

In the latest PC Gamer, you’re going to feel the intense rush of a Sky-Hook to your FACE! Either that, or an awesome six-page feature packed with BioShock Infinite details and interview material from a quartet of Irrational folks: creative director Ken Levine, director of product development Tim Gerritsen, art director Nate Wells, and lead artist Shawn Robertson.

There’s a lot of roundtable discussion about the influences behind Infinite, and the development choices and design evolution that led to the E3 gameplay demonstration. And vigors. There’s a whole sidebar about ‘em. You’ve already seen Murder of Crows–that’s the bird-based crowd control vigor you saw for the first time in last year’s gameplay demo. You send forth a flock of particularly aggressive crows to temporarily incapacitate a group of your foes.

You may not be as familiar with Bucking Bronco. That’s the vigor you saw Booker use in the latest gameplay demo to forcibly eject his enemies out from behind cover with a rolling wave of turbulent force. And after you’ve tossed enemies up with Bucking Bronco, you can extend their forced airborne relaxation session by juggling them. With bullets.

And finally, while it’s common knowledge that dead men tell no tales, it’s a slightly less-well-worn (but equally true) maxim that dead men fire no weapons. With the Weapon Slave vigor, you can put those abandoned arms to good use by turning them into your own personal automated turrets that hunt down those enemies who have not yet discarded their own lives (and guns).

As always in game development, these details are subject to change. And rest assured–there are more vigors to come, but you’ll have to wait for more details. In the meantime, why not pick up the new PC Gamer and check out the BioShock Infinite cover story. If you don’t, you’ll disappoint Shawn and Nate, and do you really want that on your conscience? Just look at those faces.

• Ken spoke with IGN Australia about a broad spectrum of topics, including the game’s setting, its expanded combat possibilities, the game engine, and more.
• Similarly, Tim’s interview with NowGamer was wide-ranging, with discussion on BioShock Infinite’s development history, the shift from a focus on darkness to light, and the crucial role of the player’s companion Elizabeth.

Both interviews were based on material shown to the press and PAX attendees in our ten-minute gameplay video, which we’re looking forward to sharing with all the rest of you later this month.

Game developers can’t stand those damned journalists, the way they pick apart your three years of hard work with a review they wrote in an afternoon. And journalists don’t understand why game developers won’t listen to all of their great ideas! What happens when we force some of the industry’s most opinionated writers and developers to hash out their issues in front of an audience? Will they finally see eye-to-eye, or kill each other in public? Watch as writers Chris Kohler (Wired.com) and Patrick Klepek (G4) square off against game creators John Drake (Harmonix) and another guest from the industry.

When: Friday 2:00pm – 3:00pm

Where: Manticore Theatre

Who: Tim Gerritsen [Director of Product Development, Irrational Games], Chris Kohler [Editor, Games, Wired.com], John Drake [Publicist, Harmonix Music Systems], Patrick Klepek [News Editor, G4], Jeff Green [Editor-in-Chief, EA]

Blogs, Facebook, forums and search engines didn’t exist fifteen years ago, and the primary tool to communicate with your fan base was the local bulletin board system (BBS) or Usenet and newsgroups services.  “You could go through Usenet groups such as comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.rpg or rec.games.computer.ultima-dragons to find fans of your game,” remembers Kay.  “The web now is fragmented with dozens of places to find discussion about a specific product or subject.  Usenet provided a very specific location for fans congregate to talk about a product.”  Reading a long list of discussions and replies provided an experience similar to the on-line communities of today, but on a much smaller scale.

The tools to create games have changed dramatically in the last decade, as have the responsibilities and sizes of departments.  “Photoshop didn’t have layers when I started,” says Lead Artist Shawn Robertson.  “3D Studio was a program in DOS and no game required 3D acceleration.”  Most games at the time were still being done in 2D, but everything started to change with the releases of Wolfenstein 3D and Duke Nukem 3D.  This change accelerated rapidly with the release of 3Dfx’s Voodoo 3D graphics cards at the end of 1996, and glQuake in early 1997.  “As an artist I did everything when I started,” Robertson adds.  “I modeled, textured, animated, rigged, and did FX for those first games.  Now everyone is much more specialized and focused on a specific role. We shipped SWAT 4 with five people in the art department.  We now have over twenty-five artists working on Project Icarus and we are still growing.”

As games evolve, their budgets grow. They require more staff, more assets, and more time to complete.  “My first game was made for the astronomical sum of one million dollars,” Director of Product Development Tim Gerritsen remembers.  “It was considered a AAA title at the time and we had a staff of 12 people to work on it.  Many of us were kvetching over how unbelievable the development budgets and the team size were.”  It isn’t uncommon today for games to have staffs of well over 100 people working for two or three years on a single game.  “We had to change the way we worked and some of us had to become managers,” says Gerritsen on how growth has changed roles for people on the team.  “We had to learn how to be a business.”

It wasn’t long ago that games were shipping on 3.5” floppy discs.  “I worked on a game that fit on three floppies,” says Gerritsen.  “That is a whopping 4.32 megabytes of compressed data.  We’d have programmers working on fancy animation systems for weeks to cull every extraneous bit of data to fit our game into those 4.32 MB.”  For perspective, a typical mp3 file is around 5 MB.  Games today can ship on a dual-layer DVD holding 8.5 gigabyte (8,704 MB) and sometimes even using a 50 gigabyte (51,200 MB) Blu-ray disc.  The amount of data is staggering, and all that data needs to be processed to fit onto that disc.  “The build process on The Lost took about 20 hours to complete,” says Lead Programmer John Abercrombie.  “It was a ridiculous setup that included a script that automated mouse movement and button presses since the application didn’t have a command line interface.”  A build process involves taking all the raw assets such as models, textures and sounds, and converting them to a format the game understands.  Depending on the game, this could be tens or even hundreds of thousands of assets.  “There is nothing worse than going through a 20-hour build process to find a blocking bug once you load the game up,” says Abercrombie.

As the amount of data in the final game grows, so does the revision database.  “I had a meeting with the IT department to discuss how large our Perforce server should be for our first next generation game,” remembers Senior Technology Programmer Steve Anichini.  Perforce is a program that builds a database that stores every revision on every asset in the game.  “We estimated it would take one terabyte (1,048,576 MB), which at the time was unheard of.  The IT department was rather skeptical the project would need that much space, especially compared to games from the previous generation which were only a couple hundred gigabytes.  By the end of the project the Perforce database was well over two terabytes,” says Anichini.

As for my own experience … when I started as a game tester back in 1998, I had to write all my bugs on sticky notes, as the company didn’t have any extra computers for the testing department.  The sticky notes were handed to the test lead, who would then add them to the bug database — which at that time was an Excel spreadsheet.  Compare that to the 35,000 bugs written up on BioShock, which would span 1.5 miles if they were to be written out on sticky notes!

Irrational was once a tiny team that made games on miniscule budgets. Today we’re much, much bigger and the budget’s grown along with the ambition of the group’s games. This month’s episode of Irrational Behavior explores what these changes have meant for the studio’s culture and the individuals who’ve been on board as the industry itself has had to adopt the professional practices of big business. Episode highlights include an insider take on the making of Thief, designers Dorian Hart and Alexx Kay waxing nostalgic on the days when they were allowed to do voice over work for Freedom Force, as well as the story of a mysterious onanist who secretly used artist Shawn Robertson’s office for forbidden self-pleasures.

Stay tuned to IrrationalGames.com for more content related to this months podcast.

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Podcast music provided by:

• Josh Rathbun
• Matt Grimm
• Geoff Graves
• Rich Vreeland/DisasterPeace
• Signal Hill